Known autonomous mobile robots for treating floors, e.g. robotic vacuum cleaners, may have difficulties navigating floor areas that are, at least to some extent, covered with obstacles such as furniture and other cluttering, obstructive objects. To achieve suitable coverage of a cluttered floor area, some robots employ an approach that involves a random or simple repetitive (e.g. zig-zag) movement pattern. While executing the selected movement pattern, the robot may maintain a map that divides the floor area being treated up into relatively coarse cells. Cells that are either covered by the robot or unreachable may be marked correspondingly, and navigation and coverage may continue until no reachable, uncovered cell is left.
A disadvantage of such an approach is that it is generally unsystematic and therefore inefficient. Due to an excess of movements and covered distance the robot's position tracking system may also exhibit a gradually increasing position error, which may cause the robot to loose its bearings and get mislocalized, which may inevitably result in poor floor covering performance.